Skills are what make humans a business resource. What skills a person possesses is a primary consideration in many aspects of managing a business operation, including hiring, employee development, succession planning, compensation, performance evaluation, and project management. Therefore, efforts have been made to explore ways to qualify and quantify skills.
Skills cataloging tools currently available are used to scan resumes and pick out certain terms. These cataloging tools then provide and maintain a list of candidates mapped to certain specified tools, deliverables, hardware, software, tasks, techniques, and methods scanned from the resumes. These catalogs may use a number of terms to describe the same skill. For example, to find a C++ object oriented programmer, one must query about “C++,” “Visual C++®,” “MS Visual C++®,” “Borland C++®,” “object oriented programming,” “object technology,” “object oriented systems development,” and so on to derive a complete list of candidates. Such tools also do not provide the manner of which the skills have been used or the manner with which the specified skill was acquired. For example, a person may have used the C++ object oriented programming skill to design, write, or maintain software programs, where the different activities may indicate appreciable differences in the level of the skill.
In a large corporation, different departments performing human resources activities often define skills differently. As a result, each department speaks its own language regarding employee skills, and there is not one integrated and standard vocabulary for describing skills. For example, persons may get hired for possessing a specific skill defined one way by human resources, but the managers trying to staff a project may not be able to identify these employees because they use different terminology to define the same skills.
One solution to the problem is to provide an artificial intelligence engine interface in the query process to link all synonymous skills together, such as Resumix® manufactured by Resumix of Santa Clara, Calif. However, although the user is spared of having to provide all synonyms in the query, the relationships between synonymous skills become hidden from the users. The data gathered are thus rendered much less valuable without the engine. Resumix® is primarily used in applicant tracking and applications using the Resumix® engine are not available for other human resources areas.